How to use mnemonics to learn Mandarin tones and pronunciation

Memory is a skill that can be practised, learnt, and mastered. By using the right method, remembering even abstract things like tones and pronunciation in Mandarin becomes possible, even easy!

Contrary to common belief, you don’t need to be endowed with a  “good memory” to learn thousands or even tens of thousands of words in Chinese.

You do need constant, meaningful and extensive exposure and engagement with the language, however, which will teach you most of what you need to know.

To learn this effectively as a foreign adult, you also need to learn how to remember things effectively. This is easier than many people think! People who win memory championships do so because they’ve practised, not because they were born with an extraordinary memory.

Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#243):

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!

Remembering is a skill you can learn

When exposure and engagement are not enough

While it’s possible to learn Chinese by relying only on exposure and engagement, that’s not always the best approach.

The most obvious one is writing Chinese characters by hand. Using mnemonics (a fancier word for memory techniques) to learn characters is popular and something you have probably heard of, even if you might not have tried it.

For example, assuming that you know the character for “horse”, 马, and the character for “woman” 女, it’s trivial to remember the character for “mother”, 妈, by associating the two components with each other in a memorable way, such as picturing your mum being ridden by a horse.

This is of course not how the character came about, but by associating the building blocks in such a bizarre and memorable way, it becomes easier to recall.

For more about understanding Chinese characters and using mnemonics to remember them, check the series starting with this article: The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell.

The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell

Using mnemonics to learn tones and pronunciation in Chinese

In this article, we’re going to have a closer look at using mnemonics to remember not characters and their components, but tones and pronunciation.

These are more abstract and require a different approach. I wrote about learning and remembering abstract things with mnemonics in this article, so this article is a deep dive into tones and pronunciation specifically.

How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components

Why some things are easier to remember

Before we get there, though, let’s back up a bit and examine why mnemonics work better to remember some things than others. To understand why, we need to look closer at the methods.

In essence, most memory techniques boil down to associating what we want to remember with something we already know. In the case of compounds, such as the character for “mother”, 妈, it’s also about associating things you already know in memorable ways.

This is easy if the things you want to memorise are concrete nouns, such as “horse” and “mother”. It’s less obvious if you want to memorise something more abstract, such as “the third tone” or “the initial zh-“.

A general example: using mnemonics to memorise numbers

I can look at a number just once and remember it for at least a few months without ever using it. The process takes a few seconds and is effortless most of the time.

I can also look at a scrambled Rubik’s cube and memorise everything I need to know to solve it blindfolded in roughly one minute.

Now, if you’re not into mnemonics or Rubik’s cube, this sounds fantastic, but if you know a thing or two about memory techniques or realise that to solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded, and know that you only need to memorise roughly a phone number’s worth of information, it’s not as impressive.

Let’s assume for a moment that you think that remembering long strings of numbers without writing them down is impressive. How can we use mnemonics to memorise something as abstract as phone numbers?

The answer is something called “pegging”, a kind of infrastructure for memory. Memorising random numbers is very, very hard without a system, so we need to create some infrastructure to help us.

How to build infrastructure for your memory

This is what it looks like in principle:

1. Identify what needs to be memorised – This could be anything. In this case, I will talk about numbers first, but I will return to tones and pronunciation in Chinese later. The important thing is to analyse what it is you need to memorise.
2. Create concrete substitutes for what you want to memorise – A basic strategy for numbers would be associating each number with a person or an object. One is Neo from The Matrix, two is Tupac, three is the Three Musketeers, and so on. Naturally, it’s better if there’s a natural connection between the numbers and the people, as you can see in my examples. This helps with the initial learning but isn’t strictly necessary.
3. Use the substitutes when you memorise – Assuming you want to memorise a number, use the people from step two instead of the numbers. Thus, if you want to remember the number 312 for some reason, picture the Three Musketeers using rapiers to fight Neo, but Tupac interrupts the fight to sing a ballad.
4. Refine and develop the system – If you’re going to memorise large numbers (or Rubik’s cubes), having one person or object per number won’t be enough. I have unique images for the numbers 0-99, which allows me to memorise a Swedish phone number using a chain of only five pictures. My own number is coal + coal + jackal + Tarzan + sun, for example.

This is an example of how you can use pegs to memorise numbers. In my system, certain consonant sounds are used for each number and I then combine these to two-syllable words. For example, /t/ is 1 and /s/ or /z/ is 0, hence “Tarzan” is 10.

How to use pegging to remember tones and pronunciation in Mandarin

This example with numbers was just that, an example. I chose numbers because it’s never a bad idea to be able to memorise phone numbers, PIN codes, logins, and serial numbers. A similar system can be designed for almost anything.

The point is that in some cases, we need to add infrastructure before we can make full use of the power of mnemonics. I’m now going to give you two examples of how this can be applied to learning Chinese, first tones, then the rest of pronunciation: initials and finals.

Note that this is meant to help you remember the tones, not pronounce or perceive the tones. These are all distinct challenges that I have covered elsewhere:

• Learning tones in general, including how to pronounce them
• Perceiving tones and sounds in Mandarin
• Different kinds of tone problems and what to do about them

The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones

Using mnemonics to remember Mandarin tones

If you’ve followed the above reasoning, the process of creating mnemonics for tones is simple:

1. Create a concrete substitute, a peg, for each tone
2. Include this substitute as an element in your mnemonic

The first step can be done in any number of ways. In cases like this, I prefer to use pegs that aren’t easily confused with other things you might want to learn, such as the components in a compound character.

For instance, you can use one of the existing colour schemes to link each tone to an element:

1. First tone → red → fire
2. Second tone → yellow → light
3. Third tone → green → vegetation
4. Fourth tone → blue → water

Whenever you want to remember the tone of a character, include the above elements in the mnemonic to set the scene.

For example, everything in the image or story is burning when it’s the first tone, dazzlingly bright when it’s the second, taking place in the deep jungle when it’s the third, and underwater when it’s the fourth.

Using mnemonics to remember Mandarin initials and finals

Even though it’s possible to devise a system to memorise all syllables in Mandarin (it’s actually quite easy, just create pegs for all initials and finals), I think that’s massive overkill. Don’t use mnemonics for everything.

Don’t use mnemonics for everything when learning Chinese

Instead, I think it’s smarter to create mnemonics only for those syllables we have problems with. Few people mix up the initials sh- and p-, but z- and zh- are trickier. Create infrastructure only when you need it!

Differentiating tricky syllables in Mandarin

Again, there are many ways of doing this. For instance, associate z- with a word you’re 100% sure starts with z-, such as 子 (zǐ), which means “son” or “child”. Then, associate zh- with something else, like 蜘蛛 (zhīzhū), “spider”. Whenever you need to distinguish between these two, incorporate either a boy infant or a spider into the story.

You can also create completely arbitrary pegs and use a person for the initial and an object for the final, but again, I think this is often overkill; you’ll end up spending more time creating mnemonics than engaging with the Chinese language.

Avoiding interference

Some readers might ask themselves if all this won’t interfere with their ordinary mnemonics. If you have memorised 美 (měi), “beautiful”, as a fifty-foot sheep winning a beauty pageant, won’t it cause trouble if you also add a jungle background to remember that it’s the third tone?

If you have memorised 政 (zhèng), “politics”, as beating people to correct their behaviour, won’t putting the entire scene underwater make things confusing? Perhaps you’ll invent new characters that have a tree 木 beside 美 or water 氵 next to 政?

Not really. There are two ways to get around this. One is to always include the tone substitute in the same way. If the fourth tone means that everything takes place underwater, that is very different from using water in other ways in a mnemonic.

If the first tone means that everything is on fire, fire can still be included in other ways (candles, bonfires, torches).

Another way to avoid confusion is to make sure you have clear pictures of your pegs and use them consistently. If you think of the third tone as a verdant jungle, you won’t confuse this with 木 if you have a picture of an oak for that character component.

I wrote more about this in the article about remembering abstract components: How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components.

How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components

Mnemonics are personal

Although you can get inspiration from other people, you can’t borrow their systems directly and expect them to work as well for you as they do for their original creators. You might not like the way I handle tones or my example for how to separate z- and zh-.

This further highlights the insight that remembering is indeed a skill you can learn. Study what works for others, try them out yourself and tweak your system. In doing so, you will not only be able to remember Chinese vocabulary but also learn more about your memory and how it works!

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in 2012, was rewritten from scratch and massively updated in March 2025.